9
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Martians Aren’t Coming
I n the course of my research, as I read frightening stories in newspapers and magazines or watched them on TV, periodically I thought to myself, it’s 1938 all over again.
To be sure, there are major differences between the instances of fear mongering I have discussed and the CBS radio broadcast on Halloween night that year. Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds, the H. G. Wells novel about an invasion from Mars, was entirely fictional, and although it generated what newspapers later described as a “tidal wave of terror that swept the nation,” the scare was short-lived. Within hours anyone who had been taken in by the performance learned the truth from friends or from announcements on the radio. 1
Still, resemblances to latter-day scares are striking. The invaders in “War of the Worlds” were barely more alien, fictitious, or threatening than the “bio-underclass” of crack babies we were told would decimate the nation’s schools and urban neighborhoods. Or the legions of “illegitimate” children said to represent “a national security issue” (Washington Post). Or teen “superpredators” for whom “life means nothing” ( Newsweek ) and against whom our president warned we had better act promptly “or our country is going to be living with chaos.” Or for that matter, young black men, the very thought of whom terrifies many Americans and motivates them to support the building of more and bigger prisons. 2
The pressing question is the same now as it was in 1938: Why do people embrace improbable pronouncements? How did listeners to “War of the Worlds” manage to disregard four announcements during the broadcast that identified the program as a radio play? Why do people today believe in the existence of mysterious new illnesses even when medical scientists say they do not exist? Why do we entertain
preposterous claims about husband abuse, granny dumping, or the middle-class romance with heroin?
Soon after the broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Hadley Cantril, a social psychologist at Princeton, set out to determine why more than a million Americans had been frightened and thousands found themselves “praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians.” In a book that resulted from his research— The Invasion from Mars, first published in 1940—Cantril refuted social scientists of his day who presumed, as one put it, that “as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy” on the rival network. Based on his analysis of the broadcast itself and interviews with people who heard it, Cantril showed that the explanation lay not in a lack of intelligence on the part of listeners but in the acumen of the program’s producers and in social conditions at the time.
The program had a credible feel, Cantril suggested, largely because it featured credible-sounding people professing to report scientific or firsthand information. The character played by Orson Welles, Professor Richard Pierson of the Princeton Observatory, was only one of several with distinguished titles and affiliations. Other professors and scientists spoke as well, and at various points in the drama people identified as secretary of the interior, vice-president of the Red Cross, and commander of a state militia chimed in.
In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they were more akin to the authorities in “War of the Worlds”: gifted orators with elevated titles. Arnold Nerenberg and Marty Rimm come immediately to mind. Nerenberg (a.k.a. “America’s road-rage therapist”) is a psychologist quoted uncritically in scores of stories even though his alarming statistics and clinical descriptions have little scientific evidence behind them.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Martians Aren’t Coming
I n the course of my research, as I read frightening stories in newspapers and magazines or watched them on TV, periodically I thought to myself, it’s 1938 all over again.
To be sure, there are major differences between the instances of fear mongering I have discussed and the CBS radio broadcast on Halloween night that year. Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds, the H. G. Wells novel about an invasion from Mars, was entirely fictional, and although it generated what newspapers later described as a “tidal wave of terror that swept the nation,” the scare was short-lived. Within hours anyone who had been taken in by the performance learned the truth from friends or from announcements on the radio. 1
Still, resemblances to latter-day scares are striking. The invaders in “War of the Worlds” were barely more alien, fictitious, or threatening than the “bio-underclass” of crack babies we were told would decimate the nation’s schools and urban neighborhoods. Or the legions of “illegitimate” children said to represent “a national security issue” (Washington Post). Or teen “superpredators” for whom “life means nothing” ( Newsweek ) and against whom our president warned we had better act promptly “or our country is going to be living with chaos.” Or for that matter, young black men, the very thought of whom terrifies many Americans and motivates them to support the building of more and bigger prisons. 2
The pressing question is the same now as it was in 1938: Why do people embrace improbable pronouncements? How did listeners to “War of the Worlds” manage to disregard four announcements during the broadcast that identified the program as a radio play? Why do people today believe in the existence of mysterious new illnesses even when medical scientists say they do not exist? Why do we entertain
preposterous claims about husband abuse, granny dumping, or the middle-class romance with heroin?
Soon after the broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Hadley Cantril, a social psychologist at Princeton, set out to determine why more than a million Americans had been frightened and thousands found themselves “praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians.” In a book that resulted from his research— The Invasion from Mars, first published in 1940—Cantril refuted social scientists of his day who presumed, as one put it, that “as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy” on the rival network. Based on his analysis of the broadcast itself and interviews with people who heard it, Cantril showed that the explanation lay not in a lack of intelligence on the part of listeners but in the acumen of the program’s producers and in social conditions at the time.
The program had a credible feel, Cantril suggested, largely because it featured credible-sounding people professing to report scientific or firsthand information. The character played by Orson Welles, Professor Richard Pierson of the Princeton Observatory, was only one of several with distinguished titles and affiliations. Other professors and scientists spoke as well, and at various points in the drama people identified as secretary of the interior, vice-president of the Red Cross, and commander of a state militia chimed in.
In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they were more akin to the authorities in “War of the Worlds”: gifted orators with elevated titles. Arnold Nerenberg and Marty Rimm come immediately to mind. Nerenberg (a.k.a. “America’s road-rage therapist”) is a psychologist quoted uncritically in scores of stories even though his alarming statistics and clinical descriptions have little scientific evidence behind them.
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